Thursday, June 03, 2010

This Is Not The Way We Put An End To War.

No, I won't. I'm not going to pretend that this has anything to do with "anti-war" activism, or that it's about bringing relief to the suffering Palestinians. Not going to go along with it. This is about something else. I've tried to make some sense of it all today in The Mark.

There’s no lack of cause to slag off Israel for the blockade. Cutting off Gaza has meant a lot of suffering among ordinary people there. But neither is there a lack of evidence that the Foundation for Human Rights & Humanitarian Relief (IHH), the Turkish charity that partnered with the Cyprus-based Free Gaza Movement to launch the flotilla, has a history of shadowy ties with some of the world’s most bloodthirsty terrorists. The IHH is openly affiliated with Hamas, and is also part of an umbrella coalition headed by Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who says suicide bombing is wrong except when it targets Israelis, and even pregnant Israeli women are fair game.

You have to look hard to find these facts reported anywhere unless they are presented as merely claims that Israel is making, but you will spend a much longer time looking for any reports at all that reveal just what the flotilla’s other big sponsor, the Perdana Global Peace Organization, is all about.

The New York Times disclosed that Perdana helped the Free Gaza Movement buy two yachts and a cargo ship for the flotilla, but even the Times noticed only that Perdana "describes itself on its Web site as opposed to war."

Perdana’s founder and guiding light is the deranged former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad, who was harping on about “hook-nosed” Jews as far back as 1970. Up to the days immediately before his retirement in 2003 he was still carrying on about how “the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

Only a few months ago, Mohamad proclaimed that European Jews “had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole governments to ransom ... Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.”

The dead are dead. Some of them got exactly what they wanted out of this - glorious death. From the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida: Three of the four Turks killed in the Israeli attack on the 'Freedom Flotilla' bound for the Gaza Strip wanted to die as Martyrs, said their relatives and friends.

We are very much aware of the ongoing suffering of the inhabitants of Gaza. We are also aware that the inhabitants of Gaza are held hostage by the terror regime of Hamas which violently took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 and uninhibited, has exerted any means to harm peace, human rights and workers supporters (including PGFTU leaders and representatives who were forced to flee to the West Bank in order to save their lives and the lives of their families) and persecute them in a brutal manner. This terror organization, whose main objective is the extinction of the Israeli State, has harmed Israeli innocent civilians and workers by firing missiles in the past ten years which intensified after the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

The Histadrut, whose value of solidarity is its top priority, supports the humanitarian assistance for the residents of Gaza, coordinates the access for different Confederations and unions to Gaza and ensures the success of their activity through coordination with the Israeli security forces.

This activity of the Histadrut proves that it is possible to offer humanitarian assistance to the residents of Gaza via peaceful means whose positive results yield assistance and aid that are meaningful.

The conduct of the flotilla’s organizers and their methods of action utterly contradict the cooperation and the responsibility to achieve the goal we all aspire to attain — effective humanitarian assistance for the residents of Gaza. . .

16 Comments:

For some reason, the comment poster thingy at NP for your story isn't working right. So, repost:

As long as our mainly progressive post secondary institutions of thought propagate and ensure that our ruling class generations adopt the affectations of cultural self hate, our mainly liberal institutions and MSMs will continue their suicide pact with terrorists and Islamic ideologues under the guise of political correctness, and will continue to fail to recognize their relativistic interpretation of Islam which leads only to appeasement.

The truth is in the entire system created under the Islamic ideology, and far too many governments and reports have gladly accepted the revisionism branding Israel guilty until proven guilty.

The failure in balancing the claims of stolen land and of Gaza as a prison with historical facts by most of the media when reporting these events perpetuates the lie and emboldens the Jihad.

The quick condemnation by all other than the OIC nations, who by default must condemn the Jewish State, proves once again their appeasement of the Islamic Caliphate. Whereas Israel has first-hand knowledge that the only thing their anti-Semitic neighhbours, bent on its destruction, only ever respect is strength, not the weakness repeated recently by Ignatieff’s response to the incident and not by Obama’s silence.

The only way to make sense in all things involving violence where Islam is involved is to understand the ideology itself, the cult of personality, the suras, the hadiths, how each of the main sects interpret them, and how it creates and controls all those who fall under it in all aspects of life. Understand that and you will stop asking why peace will never happen in the ME.

Israel should be blockaded until it renounces violence, agrees to comply with UN resolutions and recognizes the Palestinian state...woops, got that the wrong way round...renouncing violence recognizing states and all that only applies to Hamas. Islamofacists on one side, judeofascists on the other...a plague on both their houses.

The only way to make sense in all things involving violence where Zionism is involved is to understand the ideology itself, the cult of victim-hood, the historical justifications and exceptionalism, and how Zionism creates and controls all those who fall under it in all aspects of life. Understand that and you will stop asking why peace will never happen in the ME.

"They are an occupied people,they were pushed off their lands.They have suffered immensely at the hand of Jewish settlers."

Yet they seem in no rush to accept Israel's peace proposal that would grant them the independence you say they are craving.

"Abbas said that the proposed swap would have given the Palestinians land that would equal 100 percent of the West Bank. He added that there are no Israeli settlements or Israeli Arab residents in the land surrounding Gaza that was offered to the Palestinians, according to the report.

"I clarified that I refused to annex even one Israeli Arab citizen," Abbas was quoted as saying."http://www.haaretz.com/news/abbas-olmert-offered-pa-land-equaling-100-of-west-bank-1.1747

Abbas rejected it:

"Instead, he says, he will remain passive. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life." In the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian."

It amazes the wild sort of comments that come when one ventures into the politics of the Middle East. Yesterday I wrote an opinion piece for 24 hours in which I do no excuse the Israelis for what happened, but I do question the motives of the flotilla and the need for democracy in the Arabic world to end this conflict. http://bciconcoclast.blogspot.com/2010/06/time-is-now-to-push-for-democracy-in.html

The sort of things that have been posted as comments on my blog beggar belief.

What has happened in our world? It seems rational debate among a large portion of the public about anything to do with Israel has become impossible.

Bernard: It's not that "rational debate among a large portion of the public about anything to do with Israel has become impossible." It's more that allowing anyone with a computer to comment on news stories, with little or no moderation, means that rational debate on everything from climate change to the Middle East has gone out the window - at least in the comments sections.

Ok Terry, but parsing your argument, the gist seems to be that Israel's blockade of Gaza is unjust (in its collectively punitive application, if not in the principle of restricting weapons flow), but that the motives of (some) of the "activists" are less than pristine. I'd agree that this is very likely the case. But then why don't you write an article critical of the application of the blockade, to provide a bit of balance? An incessant focus on the faults of just one side does not pass the smell test, any more so than does the incessant focus on Israel's faults by some other commentators. Or will it not go over well at the "fair and balanced" NP?